Marcus' Macro Scheduler Blog

In my last post I said I would provide some tips on getting the best out of Google Groups and finding what you’re looking for. But first off let’s start with a few general search tips. Google themselves provide some helpful guides on using the regular Google search engine:

Basic Tips:
http://www.google.com/help/basics.html

Advanced Search:
http://www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html

These guides are well worth reading. There’s lots of stuff on the Advanced Search page that are easy to overlook and can be very helpful in narrowing down your search. For example, you can limit your search to a particular domain. I often use this for searching for answers on Microsoft’s site. E.g.:

“not allowed in this context” site:microsoft.com

Note that the advanced search simply adds information to the regular search query. To search within a domain it simply adds the “site:” attribute to the search term. You can add this yourself in the regular search box. You can also exclude results from certain sites:

“Macro Scheduler” -site:mjtnet.com

Note the use of the quote marks to search for a specific phrase. In my first example above I wanted to find pages on microsoft.com that contained this error message. So I needed to use the quotes.

Google Groups searches Usenet messages. It works in much the same way as Google. But since Usenet consists of a huge array of groups spanning all manner of topics it is often necessary to narrow your search down to within certain groups. Consider this Google Groups search:

create recordset

The first page of results consists of messages from various groups covering VB, SQLServer, MS Access, Dreamweaver and Ultradev. What I really want to do is find out how to create a record set in VBScript. In much the same way the regular Google search lets you search within specific domains, you can search within specific groups:

create recordset group:microsoft.public.scripting.vbscript

This searches only within the microsoft.public.scripting.vbscript newsgroup. But there are other groups that discuss VBScript. And what if you don’t know what they are called? Well, you can use wildcards:

create recordset group:*vbscript*

This returns a much more targeted, useful set of results from various VBScript groups. Definitely my most used search construct.

Hope this helps!

In a way I feel I’m about to blow my own cover with this post. But I’m pretty sure many people will find this really useful. I seem to have a reputation for knowing everything. People always come to me with their computer problems and I’m nearly always able to find a solution. When I help Macro Scheduler customers with obscure VBScript, ODBC, or Win32 API, issues they often ask “How the hell do you know this stuff?”.

The truth is I very often don’t have the answers immediately. Sometimes a support ticket will come in or I’ll see a forum post and I’ll be no more able to answer it than anyone else. But I have my secret weapons. And the fact is anyone else can use them too.

My favourite and most useful resource is Usenet. I take Usenet for granted, but I’ve realised lately that many people these days don’t know what Usenet is. Usenet is an email like distributed discussion system that was invented at Duke University (North Carolina, USA) by two graduate students in 1979. Yes, you heard that right, the best resource for answering technical questions for state-of-the-art problems is 27 years old! With Usenet, users read, post and reply to messages to a huge number of ‘newsgroups’ on all manner of topics. Newsgroups are distributed across ‘news servers’ throughout the Internet. Most ISPs have a news server that their subscribers can access.

Usenet is home to all sorts of weird and wonderful topics. Discussions of all sorts take place in Usenet. There are literally thousands and thousands of groups. Many I’d rather have nothing at all to do with! But Usenet is also the domain of programmers, technical whizkids and geeks of all varieties. And since it has been around for so long there’s almost no technical issue, programming problem or computer scenario that hasn’t been discussed at some point. So it is the perfect place to go to find out how to build that bit of VBScript, use a Win32 API function, or fix a problem in XP.

But Usenet is a bit tricky to use. You need to be able to access a news server and then you need a news reader, which is like an email client. You need to subscribe to relevant groups and then you get overwhelmed as thousands of posts pour in. And then somehow you need a way to search the content.

So Usenet is great for day to day discussions, but how do you tap this resource as a knowledge base? Well you may have heard of a company called Google. A while back Google bought a system called Deja News which archived every Usenet post since 1981. The system is now called Google Groups. It continues to archive Usenet postings as well as Google’s own web based discussion groups. It can be accessed at groups.google.com. As you probably know, Google is quite good for searching for stuff. Google Groups is no different. It combines the power of Google’s search with the massive resource of Usenet. With Google Groups you can search for pretty much any technical matter you need help with. And 99% of the time you’ll find an answer, often from a technical guru who knows his stuff, or someone who has had the same problem already.

I find that people tend to turn to Google, or one of the other search engines, to try to find answers. But specific technical questions can be hard to locate on Google, because Google indexes web sites, and even if the issue is dealt with by a web site it may be hidden deep within it’s bowels. So a web search engine isn’t always the best way to find answers to technical problems. In contrast Google Groups indexes only messages that people, like geeks and programmers, have written, and so it gets straight to the crux of the matter. It’s also instant. Pretty much as soon as a Usenet message is posted, it shows up in Google Groups. In contrast a web site can take months before it is fully indexed. So Usenet is often more up to date on technical matters.

As an example you will probably find more discussion of Vista technical issues and Vista specific programming techniques in Usenet than anywhere on the web. Long before Vista is released, beta testers, Microsoft experts and C++ gurus have been discussing such concepts via Usenet for months. And you can find this stuff now with Google Groups.

So now you know! I’m not such an expert after all. I just know where to find the answers. In my next post, I’ll explain how to get the most out of Google Groups and give you some tips on how to search and narrow down on what you’re looking for.